The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

The spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.